Outright
This service automatically imports your paid invoices from Freshbooks and keeps track of your expenses, profits, estimated taxes, and can export to ANY financial or tax software. Did I mention this was FREE!? This site is one of those sites that will help you stay organized and help you keep your books in order, be that for your business or for personal use (I use it for both!).

Google Documents

In my mind there is no better company in the world than Google, I could devote a whole blog post to how awesome their company and all their services are (hey, that’s not that bad of an idea!). This has to be my favorite service of theirs (not including the search engine, GMail, or their advertisement services). This is your space online to store all of your documents. That may sound boring, but it’s awesome! The service is free (once again) and you can store, edit, view, and share ANY kind of document: PDF, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, real text format, and plain text. Check it out! It’s really handy for helping clients with scripts or showing them your rate card, or any of another billion uses you can think of!

Launchy

Do you ever get tired of meandering through menus or digging through your dock to try to find that program? Well, no more. Launchy is a lightweight program that runs in the background and is activated by ALT+Space. When you activate it, you can launch any program on your computer just by typing in the name. How cool is that? This program saves me tons of time, I’m sure it will for you too!

Audacity

I’ve saved the best for last, especially for a blog about voice overs. Audacity is one of the best audio editors on the market, free or not. I use it when I’m not running windows (on Mac or Linux) and I love it! It has all the functionality of most audio editors and gives you some awesome capabilities when it comes to filters, importing, and exporting of audio. If I were to have a figurative voice over toolbelt, audacity would be on it. Try it out, what have you got to lose? It’s free!

Well, that’s not all the open source software in existence, but it’s definitely a recap of my favorites.

How do you go about obtaining the software that I mentioned? There’s a couple of ways. On some of the listings, I provided a link in the title of the software. Click on that, and away you go. If there is no link in the title of the software, just google it and make sure you download it from one of the top few links (to make sure you don’t infect yourself with a virus or anything.)

Happy Open Sourcing!

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What is open source? Open source means that the program is not owned by any one certain company. This is great, that’s one of the reasons why the software is free. Programmers give their time and help develop the program, and they’re paid by donations made to the project (please donate to the developers, they’re good people) and ads they sell on their sites for the program (click on their ads too).

I felt compelled to make a list of the open source applications that I use daily because these are truly great programs, sometimes even better than the program upon which they’re based.

Firefox

Probably the most widely known open source application. Firefox is an amazing internet browser. It has a built in pop up blocker, tabbed browsing, and (my favorite part) add ons! Listing all the add ons I have (not to mention how many there are). Firefox is faster than internet explorer and seems much easier to use. I recommend it highly. It’s one of my favorite applications on this list.

Thunderbird

Goodbye Outlook! From the same developers as Firefox comes the best email program on the market. Just like Firefox in it’s ease of use, speed, and add-ons, Thunderbird is my favorite email program out there.

Skype

How would you like to be able to communicate with those you know by typing, talking, or seeing them face to face all on your computer screen? If so, Skype is for you. You can call Skype to Skype for free or pay a low monthly fee to call landline phones in the US or abroad (SkypeOut). You can also have a number in your area code where people can call you just like a landline phone (SkypeIn). I use Skype for my business phone. It’s awesome (and if you want the added features, they’re cheap)!

CCleaner

Computers get clogged up when a lot of unnecessary files stick around in their temporary storage. There are also lots of other parts of a PC that need some upkeep as well. CCleaner does it all. It will help keep your temporary storage space on your hard drive sparkling clean.

GIMP

Everyone’s heard of Photoshop, but hardly anyone I meet has heard of GIMP. I think GIMP is FAR easier to use and has some pretty awesome features that you won’t find in it’s more expensive and much more complicated sibling, Photoshop CS3 or CS4. If you’re an aspiring graphics person (like me) or you just like fiddling with photos, you’ll love GIMP’s features and price tag!

Well, that’s it for part one. Next time, five more EXTREMELY handy and free applications that will be useful to you as well as your clients!

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